Day 45: Candy Bag + Des-man

Last year I used a modified version of an opener I picked up at a workshop for Halloween. It went great in all my classes. This year it totally flopped and didn’t have much depth. The fact that this happened is really interesting to me.

I am not sure if it is a difference is between first year Dan and second year or if my students are sharper this year. But either way it is a good lesson to learn that students will be different from year to year and I need to change things up based on those differences.

Anyways, I wanted to still share this activity.

I start by showing students 3 bags, each containing a combination of candy.

I tell them “Ok now I am going to mix up the candy so that each bag is labeled incorrectly”

i.e. the SS bag does not have two packs of Skittles in it and so on…

The question: If you could reach into one bag and pull out a single piece of candy, which bag would you choose?

SS?

SK?

or KK?

I remind them they can only pull one piece out of one bag. This sorta touches on deductive reasoning. The students who picked up quickly thought of every possible case that could be in each bag and eliminated until they had one case for each bag.

The students who struggled went with a random bag and hoped for the best outcome each time. I think if I use this again next year I need to modify it so it is more of a group thing instead of a whole class + teacher discussion.

In Geometry students went down to the computer lag and worked on Des-man.

I loved the fact that they started Googling how to create different types of graphs. Here are the first three pages of their creations.

I am looking forward to a weekend of recovery and excited to jump into next week! Some awesome activities in the near future, stay tuned!